 | Professor Roger Pearson
Professor of French, University of Oxford; Fellow and Praelector, The Queen's College (H6) French literature of the 18th and 19th centuries, particularly narrative fiction and lyric verse; Voltaire; the life and work of Mallarmé; poetry and its purposes in nineteenth-century France
I was born in Belfast and educated in the south of Ireland and then in England before becoming an undergraduate at Exeter College, Oxford in 1967. I read French and German, graduating with a First in 1971, and subsequently undertook doctoral research on the early nineteenth-century French writer Charles Nodier, which I completed in 1976. Meanwhile I became a College Lecturer in French at The Queen's College, Oxford in 1973. Since 1977 I have been a Fellow and Praelector (Tutor) in French at Queen's and University Lecturer in French in the Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages at Oxford. I have lived in France for two years (1969-70, 1972-3) and visit the country regularly. My research has been in the field of French literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. After my doctorate I worked principally on Stendhal, publishing a study of his novels in 1988, but I had already begun the research on Mallarmé that would culminate in two studies of his works in 1996 and 2004. A critical biography of Mallarmé will appear in 2010 in the Critical Lives series published by Reaktion Books. My interest in literary translation began when I was invited by Oxford University Press to translate a selection of Voltaire's philosophical tales, including Candide. This was published in 1990 and prompted me to undertake a comprehensive study of Voltaire's prose tales, published in 1993 and reissued in an enlarged and revised edition in 2006. This later led me to write a biography of Voltaire, which appeared in 2005. The pleasure I had taken in translating - for me a vicarious form of creative writing - encouraged me to tackle Zola's La Bête humaine and Germinal (published in Oxford World's Classics in 1996 and 2004) and Maupassant's A Life (1999), and then, briefly, to try my hand at verse translation with Voltaire's verse tale 'What Pleases The Ladies' (2006). A major preoccupation underlying my research into this wide range of authors has been the relationship between the writer and the reader. What purposes do creative writers, and especially poets, see themselves as serving, and how do they seek to fulfil them? In this vein I am now investigating the role and function of the poet in nineteenth-century French literature, with particular reference to the idea of the poet as 'lawgiver'. I am honoured and delighted to have been elected as a Fellow of the British Academy, and for my work on French literature to have been recognised in this way by a body of such distinguished specialists in this and other areas of the humanities. |
